Good morning! I recently installed the NVIDIA driver on a Budgie Atomic Desktop as per the instructions found on RPMFusion. Everything seems to be working properly, but how I can definitively confirm that the driver has been installed correctly and is fully operational? Thanks in advance for your assistance!
There are multiple ways of doing it.
The one I think of is lsmod | grep nvidia. It will show you currently loaded kernel nvidia modules.
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You can also try the command nvidia-smi.
With a successful install you’ll see output beginning with something like:
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 575.64 Driver Version: 575.64 CUDA Version: 12.9 |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
If the install was unsuccessful you’ll see an error message instead.
Note that nvidia-smi is only available if the user has already installed the xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda package. (which you failed to mention)
Without that addition to your suggested command it may lead to confusion when a user fails in attempting to run that command.
The easiest way I know to verify successful installation of the drivers is to run the command dnf list --installed \*nvidia\* and look for the package named kmod-nvidia-KERNEL VERSION with the kernel version that matches the kernel used to boot. (in addition or as an alternative to the suggestions above) All the packages listed should show the same version number except the nvidia-gpu-firmware package or possibly one of the kmod-nvidia packages if the driver has been installed for some time and updates have been done for either the driver or kernels.
Fair point. xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda is mentioned in the RPMFusion instructions that OP said they followed - but it’s stated as optional, so I shouldn’t have assumed they had done this.
All true. The advantage though of nvidia-smi (if the user installed xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda) is that it tests whether the driver can actually communicate with the GPU.
For example, say that someone installs the open-kernel driver on a machine with a GTX 1060, which isn’t supported by that driver. nvidia-smi would reveal the problem, but AFAIK all of the other mentioned tests would show no problem.
I wouldn’t waste my time using nvidia-smi, it wouldn’t show many other issues.
dmesg shows any module loading issues
$ sudo dmesg|grep -i nvidia
[ 4.745466] nvidia: loading out-of-tree module taints kernel.
[ 4.852202] nvidia-nvlink: Nvlink Core is being initialized, major device number 235
[ 4.854841] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: vgaarb: VGA decodes changed: olddecodes=io+mem,decodes=none:owns=none
[ 4.904342] NVRM: loading NVIDIA UNIX Open Kernel Module for x86_64 575.64.03 Release Build (dvs-builder@U22-I3-H04-03-5) Wed Jun 25 18:17:57 UTC 2025
[ 4.938028] input: HDA NVidia HDMI/DP,pcm=3 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.1/0000:01:00.1/sound/card0/input19
[ 4.938108] input: HDA NVidia HDMI/DP,pcm=7 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.1/0000:01:00.1/sound/card0/input20
[ 4.938175] input: HDA NVidia HDMI/DP,pcm=8 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.1/0000:01:00.1/sound/card0/input21
[ 4.938265] input: HDA NVidia HDMI/DP,pcm=9 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.1/0000:01:00.1/sound/card0/input22
[ 5.136971] nvidia-modeset: Loading NVIDIA UNIX Open Kernel Mode Setting Driver for x86_64 575.64.03 Release Build (dvs-builder@U22-I3-H04-03-5) Wed Jun 25 18:07:44 UTC 2025
[ 5.147575] [drm] [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID 0x00000100] Loading driver
[ 6.902711] [drm] Initialized nvidia-drm 0.0.0 for 0000:01:00.0 on minor 1
[ 6.931662] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: vgaarb: deactivate vga console
[ 6.988907] fbcon: nvidia-drmdrmfb (fb0) is primary device
[ 6.988916] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: [drm] fb0: nvidia-drmdrmfb frame buffer device
If you have direct access to the machine (not ssh) you can use glxinfo to confirm it’s works
glxinfo|grep -e Vendor -e direct
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